Dismantling Political Neutrality: Why the Public Service Can Never Be Politically Neutral

10/7/2023

The idea of political neutrality has long been treated as a bedrock principle of public service professionalism. It is held up as a safeguard: ensuring that public servants will serve any government faithfully, regardless of party or ideology. In public management literature and Westminster tradition alike, neutrality is often associated with loyalty to democratic institutions, protection against politicisation, and the fair implementation of policy. But when this model is placed within the constitutional and historical context of Aotearoa New Zealand, its limits become impossible to ignore. Neutrality may sound like a virtue, but in practice it might just be suppressing plurality, masking structural power, and impairing the relational work required in a contested polity.

The doctrine of neutrality depends on a particular understanding of the state. It assumes a single, unified source of legitimate authority, usually expressed through Parliament and the executive, It imagines officials as technocratic actors whose job is to translate political decisions into administrative actions. In this view, neutrality means more than non-partisanship. It means bracketing personal belief, suppressing cultural identity, and adhering to professional norms of restraint, detachment, and evidence-based reasoning. Scholars such as Mulgan (2007) defend this view as essential for maintaining public trust, especially in settings where public confidence in institutions is fragile.

But neutrality is not neutral. Every public servant operates within a political context, whether acknowledged or not. Their understanding of what counts as good advice, useful data, or a legitimate partner is shaped by institutional culture, political history, and social location. As Barry (1992) and Fischer (2003) have pointed out, the idea that advice can ever be free of values is deeply misleading. Decisions about which risks to highlight, which voices to include, and which issues to foreground are political acts, even when presented in the language of neutrality.

In Aotearoa, the fiction of neutrality is particularly dangerous. The public service does not operate in a monocultural, post-sovereign environment. It operates in the shadow and promise of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The Crown is not a single unbroken authority but a participant in a constitutional relationship that acknowledges dual sources of legitimacy: kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga. In this context, neutrality becomes a way of evading responsibility. When officials claim to be neutral in Treaty matters, they are not above politics—they are upholding one political order over another.

The supposed neutrality of public institutions has long functioned as a rhetorical device that conceals the exercise of colonial power. This point is underscored by the work of Aroha Harris and Hirini Kaa, who trace how Māori political authority and constitutional claims have been reframed or silenced through settler narratives that treat Pākehā norms of governance, legality, and rationality as universal (Harris, 2004; Kaa, 2016). These narratives do not merely marginalise Māori voices; they actively structure institutional settings to deny the validity of tino rangatiratanga. Moana Jackson (1992, 2011) has long argued that the doctrine of neutrality is a colonial fiction: a myth designed to legitimise the continued assertion of Crown sovereignty by masking it as objective governance. In his analysis, the legal system’s claim to impartiality is structurally impossible within a settler colonial state that has never recognised the constitutional basis of Māori authority. Margaret Mutu (2019) similarly critiques the ideology of neutrality, demonstrating how it functions to uphold monocultural systems of control under the guise of fairness. Her work exposes how public institutions use claims of neutrality and professionalism to suppress Māori self-determination and entrench settler norms as the default. Together, these scholars make clear that neutrality is not an absence of politics: it is a political stance in itself, one that consolidates power through denial.

Some defenders of neutrality respond by distinguishing between neutrality and impartiality. They argue that public servants should avoid political advocacy, not constitutional obligations. They point out that neutrality, properly understood, does not require cultural blindness but institutional restraint. Without it, the argument goes, public servants risk becoming activists or losing the trust of future governments. The service’s ability to offer fearless advice across election cycles would be compromised.

These concerns are not without weight. No serious model of public service can ignore the dangers of politicisation. Nor can we disregard the stabilising role that norms of restraint have sometimes played in turbulent political periods. But these arguments often confuse neutrality with professionalism and fail to distinguish partisanship from pluralism. A public service that refuses to engage relationally, on the grounds of neutrality, is not safeguarding democracy. It is shrinking it.

As Jonathan Boston and others have acknowledged, modern governance requires much more than technical expertise and fidelity to rules. It requires discretion, judgement, and political literacy. In plural, contested settings, particularly those shaped by colonial legacies and constitutional obligations: governance demands relational engagement. The public servant is not a bystander. They are a constitutional actor. To deny this is to deny the nature of the polity itself.

Neutrality, in other words, is not a shield against politicisation. It is a kind of politics. It privileges those whose worldviews align with dominant norms and disciplines those who do not. It silences the relational, plural, and culturally grounded dimensions of governance. In Aotearoa, this has meant marginalising Māori knowledge systems, undervaluing Treaty-based advice, and distorting the Crown’s obligations into policy checklists or KPIs. Such outcomes are not administrative accidents. They are the result of a doctrine that pretends to be above politics while enforcing a narrow conception of it.

A more honest and durable foundation for public service would replace neutrality with relational accountability. Officials should be bound not by detachment, but by obligations, to constitutional principles, to democratic contestation, and to the plural communities they serve. Relationality is not activism. It is the constitutional work required in a polity where consent cannot be assumed and authority must be continually earned.

This insight points toward the next problem: the tendency to model governance as a matter of delegation and control. Just as neutrality obscures relational obligations, so too does principal–agent theory flatten governance into a contractual fiction. The next section turns to that framework and examines how it fails to explain the advisory relationship in Aotearoa.

In sum, political neutrality is not a safeguard: it is a simplification. It offers surface legitimacy while obscuring deeper constitutional obligations. In a state shaped by relational commitments and contested legitimacy, the work of public servants cannot be reduced to neutrality. It must be understood as political, relational, and constitutional work. Only then can the advisory role be seen for what it is: not merely a support to politics, but a practice of governance in its own right.